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The past 6ish months I’ve been feeling pretty shithouse and has progressively gotten worse. At first I started with the odd day where I felt dizzy and nauseous, and at the same time I was having some bad back pain. I’ve had back problems for a while, leading to pinched nerves and what not. So I figured it was just the side effects of that. I started going to a physio late in 2012, he worked on it each week for a few months, I started changing my life style a bit more to help it along. Taking Green Lipped Mussel and exercises for my back etc.

The only reason I ended up at the physio was because the back pain had gotten so bad that I was struggling to move the majority of days. So Tink yelled at me, and I promised to go. The physio asked me my history of what was causing the back pain, and I said I’d had an accident in 2006 with some stairs, slipping and my spine landing on the stairs and myself ending up in the emergency room at Flinders Hospital. I’d broken some ribs, and done some damage to my spine with a few discs. He suspected I had some arthritis around my spine and ribs from where the breaks were, he could feel it with his hands. Not something you want to hear when you’re 29 years old. Knowing too well that it’s only going to get worse.

I had to do something about it, I started walking 3 times a week and doing some back orientated exercises. This helped a great deal, I was also attempting to lose weight at the same time. Around the middle of 2012 I’d weight around 137kgs, I wasn’t feeling particularly flash. I’d had a run of Glandular Fever, although my doctor thought after a visit during 2013 that it was more than likely chronic fatigue for it to be around that long and to still have some existing symptoms.

Anyway, I pushed on with the change of diet and exercised regularly. But I was still fighting nausea and dizziness regularly, and more frequently. To add to that, I was starting to lose cognitive skills on the odd occasion. No hand eye coordination, I would get dizzy just from reading with my eyes scanning across a page, walk into things, and unable to judge distance very well.

In January and February 2013, I’d taken 2 trips to the RAH with severe back pain. The emergency doctors would give me a pile of drugs and send me on my way and tell me to rest. Something I cannot do, I cannot sit still these days. I still went back to work the next day but still took it easy. The second visit to the RAH was the worst, I’d lost feeling to my arms and legs. Severe back pain, and my symptoms were getting worse with cognitive functions. I’d also been getting a fluctuating high temperature. At which on a few occasions after the RAH visit, I would have convulsions from the temperature getting so high. I would only feel it come on very suddenly and then it would hit me at any time of the day. I would also see flashes of light in my vision quite regularly, kind of like when a car drives down the street past you and you get a small reflection that dances around you while the sun reflects off the different angles of the car.

I made an appointment with my GP, and in came blood test number one. The results came back with high calcium in my blood stream. So I went for a second blood test, this time to have my magnesium levels studied, and also my parathyroid hormone levels. I knew we had a thyroid gland, but there’s more to it than just that. The parathyroid are 4 small glands attached to, near your thyroid, or on rare occasions down in your chest.

The blood test results for my parathyroid came back, and I had twice the level of the average human, and also low phosphates. The average human would have a level of 6.9, and mine was 11.6. So it seemed the doctor had found the cause of my being sick. From here things got progressively serious. I was booked in for an ultra sound, the main reason being is the doctor wanted to see if a tumour had developed around one of my parathyroid glands that may be causing them to produce more of the parathyroid hormone.

What the parathyroid gland does, from my understanding while talking to the doctor is; the gland will secrete the hormone into your body. This in turn controls the levels of calcium in your blood stream, and also your phosphates. Because I have too much of this hormone in my blood stream, my bones aren’t absorbing calcium properly, but not only that, they are making the calcium come out of my bones and back into my blood stream. So by having all this calcium in my blood stream, it’s attacking my muscular and nervous system, and also making my kidneys work overtime. Which explains the kidney pain I get too! I cant touch sugar at the moment, I feel like I’m going to slip into a coma. I have to drink a lot of water too.

The ultra sound came up empty, some nodules on my thyroid which are nothing to worry about, but not normal. Also a cyst found in my neck.

Back to the GP, for him to look at my ultra sound, and then referred me onto an Endocrinologist.

My visit to the endocrinologist was last Wednesday, he looked over my results and took down details of weight, height etc. While a lot of it I didn’t understand. I did understand this, I’ll be going more tests, yay! Next is a nuclear test. They will inject a radioactive dye into my neck and then perform an ultra sound on my neck again. Depending on what they find, it will go down 1 of 2 paths.

They will have me on medication for the rest of my life to supress the gland from producing too much of the hormone. Second is a less invasive surgery to simply have a look at my parathyroid gland and if it is enlarged. Should they find anything, the next will be a “neck exploration”, in which they will cut me open around where my collarbone is, and work their way into my neck and probably remove a parathyroid gland. Which wouldn’t be happening for another 2 months after the tests have been done.

So here I sit, waiting patiently, and dizzy. Until I get the next lot of tests done.

Firstly, I have to pee in a cup.

Updates to come when I know more.

I’ve slowly been chipping away at that site adding bits, also cleaning up my amount of domain names and not renewing a lot of them. Less is better, and more manageable. This should stick for a while, it doesn’t burn my eyes as much. But I might fiddle with the logo for a bit and photoshop something up.

The last few months have been a struggle, mentally, emotionally and physically. Her suggestion was to write down everything that stresses me, upsets me, frustrates me, and anything I hate into a crappy journal that I don’t care about. To release some anger and stress of what I keep bottled up, keeping things bottled up isn’t a good idea. But majority of the time I do, because I feel I have no one that can help no matter how hard they try. I also believe that if I can work through it myself, I’ll be a stronger person at the end of the day.

I also bought a second journal, I’ve been writing down childhood memories, either good or bad. Into this journal, just to keep for my sake.

The reason being is I think I’ve had to work hard to get where I am, and just to go slightly off topic, for probably the best part of 10 years I have wanted to get tattoo’s. But I can’t be the kind of person who just gets something because it looks cool or they like it. There’s had to be some meaning for having it for me in the first place. I have the first tattoo ready, just need to find the time to get it done, as Tink will be taking me to have it done!

But the tattoo is only words “Veni Vidi Vici”, “I came, I saw, I conquered”. Because I think what I’ve had to endure, and the hard work I’ve had to do to get where I am is explained behind it.

I’m getting a third journal to scribble down daily thoughts, I’ve just put it in random bits of paper lately so I’d rather somewhere I can store it without getting lost or ruined.